Joking Asides

Joking Asides PDF Author: Elliott Oring
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607324911
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
About the Author -- Index

Joking Asides

Joking Asides PDF Author: Elliott Oring
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607324911
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Get Book Here

Book Description
About the Author -- Index

The Soul of Wit

The Soul of Wit PDF Author: Carl Dale Hill
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803223691
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Witz can serve either builders or destroyers, defenders of the faith or heretics, diplomats or oafs, male chauvinists or radical feminists. Witz shows its volatility in setting up cultural, class, and gender boundaries just to smash them. Hill argues that there is something about Witz that makes it quintessential to the plight of modern culture. He views Witz as an ahistorical subject developing over time and transcending the lifespans and intentions of the authors who have written with or about it.

Only a Joke Can Save Us

Only a Joke Can Save Us PDF Author: Todd McGowan
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810135825
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Only a Joke Can Save Us presents an innovative and comprehensive theory of comedy. Using a wealth of examples from high and popular culture and with careful attention to the treatment of humor in philosophy, Todd McGowan locates the universal source of comedy in the interplay of the opposing concepts lack and excess. After reviewing the treatment of comedy in the work of philosophers as varied as Aristotle, G. W. F. Hegel, Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, and Alenka Zupancic, McGowan, working in a psychoanalytic framework, demonstrates that comedy results from the deployment of lack and excess, whether in contrast, juxtaposition, or interplay. Illustrating the power and flexibility of this framework with analyses of films ranging from Buster Keaton and Marx Brothers classics to Dr. Strangelove and Groundhog Day, McGowan shows how humor can reveal gaps in being and gaps in social order. Scholarly yet lively and readable, Only a Joke Can Save Us is a groundbreaking examination of the enigmatic yet endlessly fascinating experience of humor and comedy.

The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious

The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious PDF Author: Sigmund Freud
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101644796
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Why do we laugh? The answer, argued Freud in this groundbreaking study of humor, is that jokes, like dreams, satisfy our unconscious desires. The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious explains how jokes provide immense pleasure by releasing us from our inhibitions and allowing us to express sexual, aggressive, playful, or cynical instincts that would otherwise remain hidden. In elaborating this theory, Freud brings together a rich collection of puns, witticisms, one-liners, and anecdotes, which, as Freud shows, are a method of giving ourselves away. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Inside Jokes

Inside Jokes PDF Author: Matthew M. Hurley
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262294818
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
This evolutionary and cognitive theory of humor seeks to reveal the complex science behind why we crack up. “A sophisticated analysis . . . written with clarity, good cheer, and, of course, wit.” ―Steven Pinker, author of How The Mind Works Some things are funny—jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed—but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature—aka natural selection—cannot just order the brain to find and fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor.

What's funny? A definition of humor and humor theories

What's funny? A definition of humor and humor theories PDF Author: Irina Wamsler
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656844127
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : de
Pages : 44

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Book Description
Akademische Arbeit aus dem Jahr 2007 im Fachbereich Amerikanistik - Linguistik, Note: 2,1, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Laughter is a respond to a specific stimulus. This implies that some conditions have to be fulfilled in order to say something is funny, like for instance an unlike situation, an absurd comment, or an ironical situation. Referring to Raskin, humor means that a person “finds the audial or visual stimulus funny” (1985: 1). Ross says that humor is “something that makes a person laugh or smile” (1998: 1). For joke tellers or producers of sitcoms, laughter is the desired response to a certain situation or conversation. Sometimes, though, other reactions occur as well. The broad scope of humor research makes it impossible to draw attention to all current issues. But some research and information which is related to the theories of humor are introduced in the following passages.

Semantic Mechanisms of Humor

Semantic Mechanisms of Humor PDF Author: V. Raskin
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9789027718211
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
GOAL This is the funniest book I have ever written - and the ambiguity here is deliberate. Much of this book is about deliberate ambiguity, described as unambiguously as possible, so the previous sentence is probably the fIrst, last, and only deliberately ambiguous sentence in the book. Deliberate ambiguity will be shown to underlie much, if not all, of verbal humor. Some of its forms are simple enough to be perceived as deliberately ambiguous on the surface; in others, the ambiguity results from a deep semantic analysis. Deep semantic analysis is the core of this approach to humor. The book is the fIrst ever application of modem linguistic theory to the study of humor and it puts forward a formal semantic theory of verbal humor. The goal of the theory is to formulate the necessary and sufficient conditions, in purely semantic terms, for a text to be funny. In other words, if a formal semantic analysis of a text yields a certain set of semantic proptrties which the text possesses, then the text is recognized as a joke. As any modem linguistic theory, this semantic theory of humor attempts to match a natural intuitive ability which the native speaker has, in this particular case, the ability to perceive a text as funny, i. e. , to distinguish a joke from a non-joke.

The Comprehension of Jokes

The Comprehension of Jokes PDF Author: Graeme Ritchie
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351232738
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
The Comprehension of Jokes consolidates and develops the tradition of analysing jokes, by defining a framework of concepts which are suited to capturing what happens when someone understands a joke. The collection of concepts presented improves upon past work on joke analysis, outlining a simple model of text comprehension which supports all the assumptions necessary for a model of joke-understanding. This proposed framework encompasses and integrates a relatively wide range of disparate factors, including incongruity, superiority, and impropriety. Written by an expert in the field of humour, it provides a conceptual basis which will help to map out the landscape of joke comprehension. The book draws on past suggestions in many areas, primarily philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. Current theories of how people understand non-humorous texts offer some important ideas, such as the need for representations of differing beliefs about the world, or the way that predictions may occur during the understanding of a text. The framework improves the clarity and coherence of some existing theoretical proposals and combines these ideas into a well-defined way of describing how a person understands a newly-encountered joke. All this is illustrated using typical textual jokes, some analysed in considerable detail. The book enables hypotheses about why jokes are funny to be stated more precisely and compared more easily, and should contribute to the development of a fuller cognitive model of joke comprehension. The Comprehension of Jokes will be of great interest to academics and postgraduate students in humour research, as well as those in disciplines like linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science who wish to explore the field of jokes and humour.

The Game of Humor

The Game of Humor PDF Author: Charles R. Gruner
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9780765806598
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Humor, wit, and laughter surround each person. From everyday quips to the carefully contrived comedy of literature, newspapers, and television we experience humor in many forms, yet the impetus for our laughter is far from innocuous. Misfortune, stupidity, and moral or cultural defects, however faintly revealed in others and ourselves, seem to make us laugh. Although discomforting, such negative terms as superiority, aggression, hostility, ridicule, or degradation can be applied to instances of humor. According to scholars, Thomas Hobbes's "superiority theory"--that humor arises from mischances, infirmities, and indecencies, where there is no wit at all--applies to most humor. With the exception of good-natured play, Charles R. Gruner claims that humor is rarely as innocent as it first appears. Gruner's proposed superiority theory of humor is all-encompassing. In "The Game of Humor, "he expands the scope of Hobbes's theory to include and explore the contest aspect of "good-natured" play. As such, the author believes all instances of humor can be examined as games, in terms of competition and keeping score--winners and losers. Gruner draws on a broad spectrum of thought-provoking examples. Holocaust jokes, sexual humor, the racialist dialogue of such comic characters as Stepin Fetchit and Archie Bunker, simple puns, and many of the author's own encounters with everyday humor. Gruner challenges the reader to offer a single example of humor that cannot be "de-humorized" by its agonistic nature. "The Game of Humor "makes intriguing and enjoyable reading for people interested in humor and the aspects of human motivation. This book will also be valuable to professionals in communication and information studies, sociologists, literary critics and linguists, and psychologists concerned with the conflicts and tensions of everyday life.

Conceptual Blending in Jokes

Conceptual Blending in Jokes PDF Author: Yuliya Asmolovskaya
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640586220
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 22

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Hamburg (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Highlights in Cognitive Linguistics, language: English, abstract: The emerging ability for blending different mental spaces, so argue Fauconnier and Turner (2002: V), allowed humans to gain the upper hand over competing species from the Upper Paleolithic onwards, since this ability gave them the imagination required to invent new concepts, tools and means of communication (among them language). On the basis of this discovery and the initially developed Mental Space theory, Fauconnier and Turner advanced a striking theory called the Conceptual Blending theory. [...] Therefore, in this term paper I focus entirely on jokes, which I attempt to interpret by means of the Blending theory. To investigate cognitive processes involved in joke comprehension, I have interviewed four English native speakers with the intention of finding whether all of them are able to explain why the joke is funny and which incompatible elements are responsible for its humorous effect. Taking into account the participants' answers I have tried to define the input spaces (by naming their constituents) and the blended space. Additionally, the participants' answers were evaluated with regard to the role of background knowledge, which is necessary in order to comprehend the joke. Finally, I examined whether the Conceptual Blending theory might be applicable for the analysis of joke processing and comprehension in general and what difficulties can arise during the creation of the input spaces and the blend. Thus, in the following sections I will first introduce important information on conceptual blending and then analyze selected jokes according to the Conceptual Blending theory, taking into consideration the interviewees' explanations of the jokes. Central to Conceptual Blending theory is the notion of the conceptual blending network (or conceptual integration network), an array of mental spaces in which the processes of blending unfold (Fauconnier and Turner, 1998b). A basic conceptual integration network contains four mental spaces: two input spaces, a generic space and a blended space (see Figure 1). Input spaces are on-line conceptual representations constructed under the influence of the incoming information but tapping stored cognitive models. [...]